


Blind to Each Other

by Silex



Category: Fire Coming Out of the Monkey's Head - Gorillaz (Apollo Theater Music Video)
Genre: Based on a song, Fantasy setting, Gen, Jukebox Fanworks Exchange
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-18
Updated: 2018-05-18
Packaged: 2019-05-08 10:15:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14692119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silex/pseuds/Silex
Summary: Written for an exchange, based on a song. It's a look at the lives of the Happyfolk and particularly, the life of one of them, one who realized that something was happening, even if she couldn't understand what.





	Blind to Each Other

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lunarium](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lunarium/gifts).



> I want to thank Lunarium for asking for this song and giving such interesting prompts.

Nooleena could see the shadows, but when she told the others all they did was laugh and applaud her stories. That was what she had been named for after all, when she was old enough to have a name proper. She’d been born Tulili, darling little one, like all children, but as soon as she could speak she’d been telling stories.

‘Where are the sweet berry cakes I made?’ her mother would ask and she told a story about a rainbow bird coming down and asking for one and enjoying the taste so much that he called all his friends, each a different color of the rainbow so that they could all enjoy the cakes as well. Her mother scolded her, though she complimented the story.

When asked why she didn’t want to go harvest roots for supper she said that the roots were still sleeping and that having to sing to them to keep them quiet as she dug them up was too tiring.

Her stories never got her out of work or trouble, but everyone enjoyed them, earning her the name Nooleena, shape of a cloud, because her imagination ran wild, letting her paint pictures of things that weren’t there.

Everyone thought the shadows were the same thing.

She’d been nervous of them at first, thinking them clouds gathering to bring rain, or leaves falling early, but there were no clouds and the trees still held all their leaves.

Besides, there was no rain.

What she found was a pattern to the movement of the shadows, dancing people with no one to cast them.

But they weren’t dancing, they were running and hiding and prowling and seeking.

They moved like the men out hunting, but they weren’t after game. The shadows didn’t eat the shadows of game, nor did they pluck the shadows of fruit from the bushes and trees. When she told the elders and anyone else who could listen about them they complimented her on her stories and listened intently as she continued to describe the antics of the shadows.

Coming up with a whole village of imaginary people was very impressive as far as they were concerned, but typical of her.

Everyone loved the world that they thought that she had built, never realizing that it was going on all around them. Only she could see it, but it didn’t trouble her, at least not at first.

The shadows were furtive, careful at first, but grew bolder in time. She tried to interact with them, to stand in their path, but they moved past her, over her, through her.

There were times when she felt their passing like a hot breeze, but they never stopped, just like the others never stopped when they went through the shadows.

Watching her friends and family she realized what she was seeing and understood. Neither they nor the shadows could see each other.

It was a shocking discovery, and for the first time in her life she felt fear, true, bone deep fear that couldn’t be soothed by the reassurances of her mother, didn’t pass like the fury of the seasonal storms.

How could there be people that were blind to each other, so far apart that they couldn’t even touch each other when they were standing in the same place? For she’d become increasingly certain that the shadows were people with minds and lives of their own. They were strange people with different rituals and dances, but people none the less.

Were the shadows just like her friends and family to themselves while she and the others were all shadows to them? It was a thought that occupied far too much of her time. She spent time staring at her own shadow as well as her reflection in the water. There were times when she was afraid to move from the clear pool of the well, because when the clouds passed just right her reflection came into sharp focus and she found herself wondering if there was a her in the water, one that would vanish without a trace when she moved away.

And what would happen to her if the her in the water was the one to move first? That was why getting water took so long, she couldn’t do it when a cloud passed over and made her reflection so clear.

Her family and the others laughed at her explanation at first, but when they realized how deeply it troubled her, they tried to reassure.

Except they couldn’t, because they didn’t see it either.

They didn’t see the shadows moving with purpose, their strange, falling dances at night, the way there seemed to be more of them every day.

The shadows were purposeful and hungry, clouds gathering in the wind before a great storm, one that would shake the leaves from the trees and churn clots of foam on the water of the lake.

Nooleena loved playing in the froth when the storms passed, building little worlds in it and pretending that she was an elder in a village in the clouds. It was a fun game, one that made the fiercest of storms less frightening so perhaps that was how she had to view the shadows.

She followed them, tried to recognize them, because like people there were differences between them. She named them and they became knowable, less frightening. Trikattatirk was quick and would start the falling dance, Baahnoo, was a fast mover, but often stumbled. Conurrkit was the one who brought them to the mountain.

Their movements became even more purposeful, their dances quick and hungry and happy.

She tried to join in the shadow dance, hoping that there was a shadow like her, one that could see.

She kept at it until her mother caught her in the act and scolded her. When she told the story of why her mother frowned and told her to stop, to make up stories about birds and fish and the mountain, but not about shadows.

It was the first time she’d been told not to tell a story and it hurt like she’d stumbled and fallen.

The hurt didn’t go away though, and the frown that her mother had worn when she saw the shadow dance didn’t go away either. It stayed and deepened and Nooleena was sad.

She’d been the cause of all this, of something she couldn’t understand.

Clouds gathered over the village, but not ones that could be seen. People moved slowly, fearfully, the shadow of the mountain loomed over them even when the sun was at the top of the sky.

They all shuddered in a breeze that wasn’t there.

More and more shadows arrived every day, happy and at ease, unaware of the changes.

“Stop, please,” Nooleena would whisper at them when no one was around, “We can’t see you and you can’t see what you’re doing, but it’s frightening. People are scared and not sleeping well and the mountain isn’t sleeping well either. Please don’t wake up the mountain. Don’t make Monkey talk.”

She’d always called the mountain Monkey. That was her name for it because it was hunched and fuzzy in the distance, like a sleeping monkey. It was strange because she liked the mountain and she didn’t like monkeys. They were too loud and fast and shrill when they were awake and moving, but when they were asleep she always wished that she could reach out and touch one to feel if it was soft as it looked.

The mountain wasn’t soft though, it was tall and mighty and it wasn’t happy.

That much the others in the village could tell, that there was something wrong with the mountain.

Unable to see the shadows, they couldn’t tell what it was, but they knew.

The unease hung over them like a storm, made their sleep restless.

Nooleena continued to talk fruitlessly to the shadows, begging them to stop upsetting the mountain.

The shadows couldn’t see her, her people couldn’t see them and there was nothing she could do to change that.

How frightening it was to live in a world where people, for the shadows clearly were people, to be close enough to reach out to each other, but unable to see or feel.

All she was able to do was wait and hope until one morning something changed.

The ground shifted almost imperceptibly, a rumble that she felt in her bones and heart.

She tried to tell her mother, her father, but they simply continued as they always had, dismissing her pleas as another of her stories, tales that had grown too dark for them.

It was, she understood at last, like trying to describe thunder to someone who had never heard it.

The ground did shift, did shake and it wasn’t her imagination.

As always, the hunters went out to catch what they could for supper. To everyone else it was just another day, the same as the one before and the same as tomorrow would be.

They didn’t see the shadows, they couldn’t imagine anything different.

The hunters didn’t return that night, but no one worried. There was plenty of food and it wouldn’t be the first time the men who had gone out hunting were away for more than a day.

Late the next afternoon the hunters were found by a group of children out berry picking. They had traveled farther than normal and noticed a strange smell coming from the river they were walking along, a smell that made their noses burn and their heads spin. Curious, for there was no reason to be afraid, they kept going. Eventually they started seeing strange cracks in the mud of the riverbanks and not long after that they came across the hunters, all dead.

That night the villagers gathered around a bonfire and danced and sang, watching the sparks from the fire rise up into the sky, joining the stars. Their singing and dancing would bring the spirits of the hunters home so that they could walk the path the sparks made and reach the plains of the clouds above and from there make it to the smiling moon.

The dance of farewell had always been one of Nooleena’s favorites, but this time her feet moved sluggishly, her singing was off-key and her laughter was strained. A celebration of the lives of their dead friends brightened everyone’s spirits, took their minds off their worry.

Nooleena on the other hand worried that there was a connection. The shadows hadn’t stopped what they were doing, but even they seemed nervous.

They knew something that she and her people didn’t.

Unsure of what else to do, Nooleena woke up early the next morning, while everyone was still sleeping from the celebration. She gathered enough food and water for a day’s travel, or what she hoped was enough. She’d never gone more than an hour’s walk form the village, but this time she knew she had to go farther below the mist and clouds.

Turning her back to the mountain Nooleena traveled down the gentle slopes surrounding her village, wishing that someone would follow her, even if it was just out of curiosity.

The rumbling grew, shaking trees, making rocks clatter and fall.

She ran.

Faster and faster, not understanding what she was fleeing, she ran.

Behind her the mountain roared.

Monkey called out in rage, an angry growl as the sky went from day to night, a glow like sunset coming from the wrong direction, behind her.

Below the clouds it was darker still, the trees reduced to shadows in the twilight gloom that had consumed the world.

Too dark for shadows.

Catching her feet on a fallen branch she stumbled and fell.

Lungs on fire she struggled to catch her breath.

The air was hot the leaves hissed as though rain was falling.

But it wasn’t rain, it was ash, hot and choking on her tongue.

Gasping, tears tracing shimmering lines down her face, washing away the gray, she looked back.

A splotch of deeper shadow stood out in the darkness, like the shaking silhouette of a lightning blasted tree. One of the shadows, and it was looking at her. Looking right at her.

Seeing her.

It reached out to help her up and fingers passed through each other like smoke through leaves.

“You see me?”

Not only did it see her, it heard her.

It made a series of painfully harsh clicking and popping noises in response, not at all the sounds she would have expected a shadow to make.

As broad as her imagination had been, it had never occurred to her that something would speak words that she couldn’t understand and that hers would be equally strange to it.

The darkness and heat grew with a hissing roar and the feeling of something massive coming towards her.

Not just her, the shadow too.

It looked up, towards the mountain, towards her home.

And it shook.

This time she reached out to it.

It let out a long, crackling hiss, dry leaves crumbling, and grabbed frantically at her hand, motioning with sharp, frantic gestures.

She got up and it started running, down, away from her.

Right before it was lost from sight it stopped and looked at her, clicked and chittered.

The words were impossible for her to understand, but the meaning was clear. It wanted her to follow, so she did.

Down and down and down they ran, farther and farther from her home.

Farther than she’d ever imagined going.

Certainly the smiling moon was nearer to her village than she was now, for on most nights the moon could be seen and this place she was in couldn’t.

Dark as it was, she couldn’t tell, but even the trees seemed different, their trunks thicker, their branches more twisted.

The ground grew soft with moss and fallen leaves, springy underfoot, hiding roots that threatened to trip her with every step.

Then the shadow was gone, vanished as though the darkness had swallowed it whole.

She could still hear it though, the sounds of its strange words as it called out to her rose above the hiss of ash and the rumble of the mountain.

Nooleena plunged forward into the darkness, the shadow’s voice growing louder and louder until it drowned out the noise of ash hitting the leaves. At the same time, it grew harder and harder to pinpoint the source, the clicking seeming to come from all directions at once.

It took her far too long to understand the reason why, not until after she realized that ash was no longer falling down on her.

The shadow had lead her into a cave and by the sounds of it, was urging her to keep going.

She tried her best to follow, ran and stumbled until she smacked face first into a wall.

Letting out a sharp cry she fell to her knees on the soft, sandy floor of the cave and began to sob. She’d come so far, running from things she didn’t understand to things she didn’t know and it was too much to take in, too much to think about.

The shadow was there, though she couldn’t see it, its touch was cool on her shoulder and then her face, tracing the lines of her tears.

It made a questioning sound

She didn’t know either, she hadn’t cried like this since she was a child, before she learned that there was nothing to be afraid of.

There was though, there was so much to be afraid of, so much that no single person could know. Probably not even two people working together could know it all. After all of all the people in her village, only she could see the shadows, and of all the shadows, only one the one had seen her.

She wished that she could hold its hand as the air grew too heavy to breathe and a wave of heat washed into the cave.

It was like the time when she was little and had gotten too close to the cooking fire, reached out to touch the light and felt the heat burn.

This was worse though, not just her fingers, but everywhere.

Her eyes watered, but it was too hot for tears.

The shadow fell over her, as though it were trying to push her down into the cool sand of the cave floor.

The cool sand.

She understood.

Frantically she dug down and buried herself, the sand protecting her from the heat until it eventually passed.

When it did everything was quiet, quieter than she remembered from before.

The mountain still rumbled, but it was like distant thunder after the worst of the storm had passed.

She uncovered herself and went to the mouth of the cave.

Outside the sun was just starting to rise, the first rays of light illuminating a changed landscape.

The trees had been different and now they were more different still, black and gray with ask, their leaves wilted from heat.

No birds sang, do bugs hummed.

Behind her the shadow made a small sound and started walking down the mountain, farther from where she had come.

Nooleena hesitated, looked back up, towards where her village was.

She knew in her heart and the horrible, hollow ache in her stomach, that it wasn’t there anymore. None of the others had run, none of them had found the cave she had hidden in.

There would be nothing left back the way she had come.

The shadow was walking down, towards something.

It had to have come from somewhere.

With nowhere else to go, Nooleena made up her mind to follow the shadow home. After all if it could see her and she could see it, there would have to be others who could see and she could tell them what had happened.

And maybe two people couldn’t figure things out together, but three or four or more might.

There was no telling how many of them there might be, or how many different kinds of people.

There was no telling what they could do together. She just had to find them.


End file.
